Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Category Archives: Sony Online Entertainment

There has been this problem in MMORPGs of having to have sufficient content… in the form of whatever bad guys or monsters… or mobs if you want to go Diku MUD old school in your terminology… available for players while not looking like you are packing them in like a vending machine.

This was not really a problem back in the days of MUDs simply because the populations were tiny. A MUD that kept 100+ player population online around the clock was a booming success in 1995. But when it came to Ultima Online or EverQuest there was a mass of players eager to play and advance, and advancement comes through the slaying of foes. At least in old Norrath that ended up meaning a pile of mobs outside of home towns to start with, most non-aggro, and then a sort of series of concentric circles of higher level, more difficult mobs in bands as you moved further from the starting zone.

Out in front of Qeynos during the low level bubble

It wasn’t quite so cut and dried in the early days. EverQuest was pretty well known for mixing high and low level mobs together in a zone. West Karana was mostly a low level hunting ground, but had that cyclops and a werewolf and a few other surprises lurking about.

Froon in West Karana

But by 2004 and the introduction of EverQuest II and World of Warcraft the idea of how mobs had to be stratified seemed to be pretty settled. Outside every town or quest hub would be several layers of mobs of increasing levels of difficulty. My mind immediately goes to the vast array of gnoll camps in the low hills of Antonica, outside of Qeynos, back in EQII.

When it comes to WoW, Westfall springs to mind with its rings of Defias around the main alliance outpost.

In both cases, there were lots of mobs present, spread out to accommodate parallel sets of adventurers, and just sitting there, milling about, waiting for somebody to show up. You could avoid them… in both zones the general logic was that such groups would be clear of the roads… but they certainly looked like they had the place surrounded, if in a somewhat desultory way. They were off far enough to not aggro anybody accidentally, spread out, oblivious to their fellows being slain while clearing in line of sight (but outside of their aggro radius), and looking pretty static.

And they remained there long after you were done with them, but still had to be avoided unless you just wanted to kill a few extra gnolls or Defias.

Blizzard set out to solve this and, with Wrath of the Lich King introduced two things.

The first was phasing, where the environment changes after you complete a specific quest or task. While problematic, it did allow the game to remove mobs that no longer made sense in the context of the story.

Then there was a slightly more subtle bit of work that took all those mobs idling around the quest hub and gave them something to do. They were put onto the field with a like number of your allies and set in a pitched battle, NPC on NPC, so everybody looked busy. That also kept the field from being a nightmare to pass through, as the hostiles otherwise engaged would not aggro on you unless you attacked them. But the NPCs were otherwise barely chipping away at each other, so you could step in and attack a hostile and end up battling them directly, as aggro was easily pulled from the NPC it was fighting.

And, as it happened, that worked out and has become a staple of Azeroth ever since, an easy way… well, I don’t know if it is easy, so maybe just a reliable way… to put that first belt of mobs out there that you need to kill without having them look idle or bored and without them becoming an annoying wall of conflict when you need to move through them to the next location.

Old news. That was back in 2008, which is further from today than from the launch of the game. But I was reminded of how that played out when I ran across an old screen shot from EverQuest II, a screen shot that raises my hackles to this day.

I needed that runesmith!

SOE was on to a similar idea to what Blizzard eventually adopted, that mobs ought not to be static but should interact with their environment and trade blows with their natural enemies should they run across them. And they put a bit of that in from the start of the game.

So we have the Deathfist runesmith in the screen shot battling with the local faeries. They are natural enemies and they should not get along. Dynamic environment!

The problem here was implementation. Unlike the Blizzard solution, SOE left the locked encounter code in place, so when the the runesmith began fighing with the faeries, you could no longer attack him and get credit for killing him. And you needed to kill him, as you were likely there in the Valley of Sacrifice to slay him and seven more like him. Only he was something of a rare spawn. And when he did spawn, he spawned near the faeries, who would immediately engage him.

So you had to clear all the faeries, clear all the place holders, and keep clearing them across a stretch of land, because if you missed a faerie your runesmith might spawn and get tagged before you got to him.

And that all assumed you were the only one out there looking to get him. Solo, and in optimum conditions, I have spent well over an hour trying to get those eight kills. If somebody else was there hunting Deathfist runesmiths as well, then the competition became fierce because… if I recall right… back in the day you didn’t just have to kill them, but you also needed a drop, a drop that wasn’t 100%.

And you couldn’t just dump the quest, as it was step 8 in a 23 quest long chain that ran all over the isle of Zek and which would eventually send you off to Feerrott.

SOE had the right idea. The implementation was just such that it seemed to maximize frustration. If it had been some common mob, it would have been interesting.

Then again, they did create a situation that I still think of years after I last ran through the Valley of Sacrifice on the isle of Zek. And I bet it hasn’t changed after all these years.

I have nothing new to gripe about when it comes to WordPress.com, so I will just repeat that I really, really hate the new post editor and it is going to be very painful to transition once they drop support for the “classic” version. I hope they at least fix the bit that crashes my browser when I try to use it.

So, with that out of the way, I want to ask a philosophical question about post categories. As you can see on the side bar over on the right, there is a drop down that lists out the larger categories that I write about here. Those are general areas, usual a game or a company or a specific group, while I use tags for specific items, like a dungeon or expansion associated with a specific game.

My question is, what should I do about SOE and Daybreak?

Daybreak… wait, no!

I have a category for Sony Online Entertainment, which I use for topics that involve the company itself rather than just a specific game. When they were bought out by Columbus Nova Prospekt and changed their name to Daybreak Game Company, I made a new category for that.

Here’s the right one…

But now I wonder if that was the right move? Should I have kept continuity, and the load of history with the SOE category, and just changed it to Daybreak? Or should I have just kept on with SOE, because a Limburger cheese by any other name smells the same? Or do I stick with two, and use them both when referring to something that applies to both or refers to the history that comes with SOE, eventually using only Daybreak as the company starts using its new logo and domain name to form its own identity?

Angry CONCORD guy comes to life!

When is it no longer relevant to refer to SOE and the history that brings?

And speaking of paying for games, I wondered where Facebook credits were headed. They seemed like a bad deal for games relative to paying companies like Zynga directly. Despite speculation that they would be the ONLY currency allowed on Facebook, that has still not to come to pass.

Blizzard introduced the Celestial Steed (aka the sparkle pony or the greed steed) to the Blizzard Store. Blog reactions were mixed, but the queue to buy the mount on day one got 140,000 transactions deep. That is a lot of horsies, which meant they were everywhere in the game pretty soon. The Lil’ XT companion pet that was introduced at the same time also made its own mark on the world… until Blizzard toned it down.

Since the instance group was getting close to finishing up the classic WoW dungeon and wondering if we should press through the Burning Crusade content (as short as it passes), we started exploring other games as possible alternatives. This lead us to try out Runes of Magic for a bit.

merry karanas png porn
[Things in the Karanas have never been that merry]

eve do cnr need tp
[I even keep an extra roll on hand]

soe taking over?
[SOE is dead, man]

EVE Online

The annual purging of Delve seems to be about complete, our foes have fled before us, and what remains of N3 is a wreck. Even the Reavers have been taking sovereignty from them, while the local renters have started paying us tribute to leave them alone, that “shame renters into defending the space they pay for” plan having not worked out. The CFC changed its name to The Imperium and has pretty much “won” the Dominion sovereignty version of the game. Not bad for April.

World of Warcraft

Sometimes I think I play a different version of this game than some other bloggers. Or maybe I just don’t play as much or I have too many alts or too many garrisons or whatever. But I keep logging on and seeing how much I have left to do/see/explore and then I compare this to people who are “done” with the expansion and already complaining about needing new content. Maybe I am slowing down in my old age.

In WoW the instance group is on the road to 100. I’ve been letting down the team by not showing up lately, but at least we’re in the gap between new dungeon content. Still, it would be nice to get there before the inevitable summer hiatus kicks in and the group is pretty much done until autumn. So I expect May will focus on that.

There will be things to do in EVE Online… I have a lot of crap to move out of Fountain to start with… but otherwise my space tribe is sort of in a holding pattern until June and the Fozzie-Sov comedy/chaos event. Also, if I am using the term “space tribe,” which comes straight from the mouth of The Mittani, I have clearly been assimilated. All hail The Imperium!

I will play a new game in May… because I really only played WoW and EVE in April… and likely write about it as well. If you’re friends with me on Steam, you might have seen it added to my list and have been asking yourself, “WTF?” There is a comedic opportunity reason behind this. We’ll see how this plays out.

And, finally, I am going to start working on getting official Daybreak endorsement for my FreeRealms emulation project, because they seem to be into that sort of thing at the moment.

They also apparently have a working domain at daybreakgames.com now and a new site that seems to be pretty much free of Sony or SOE mentions along with new terminology like Daybreak Cash rather than Station Cash. It is like they are a real company now!

The Daybreak logo was designed to reflect that brand, with a nocturnal aspect, (the owl’s eye), a technological aspect (the gear within the eye), and a more literal aspect (the “Daybreak” of a rising sun within the gear). The red, black, and yellow of Daybreak logo is starkly different from the familiar blue and white of the Sony Online Entertainment label, which might serve to emphasize a separation from the company’s past. Internally, Smedley said that separation has already happened.

Summarizing the rest of the interview, there is nothing but geezers left in the company, WoW is dead, and long live cash shops or something.

The web sites are all still flavored “Sony Online Entertainment,” and I haven’t even seen an official logo yet for Daybreak Games Company, but the wheels of the Columbus Nova Prime acquisition continue to grind forward.

The week before last we had the “straight from the acquisition playbook” layoffs when DGC shed those it saw as redundant, low performers, or possible trouble makers when it came to their plans. None of those who were let go had anything bad to say about DGC, but a good severance package can have that effect. I don’t know if Columbus Nova Prime when full EA in the fine print, telling people they would want their money back if they said anything negative about Daybreak, but I wouldn’t count that out. Not that I expected negativity. The first day there is generally too much shock and dealing with the business at hand, and later, if you’ve left friends behind, you don’t want to shit all over them.

With that settled for the moment, DGC had to turn around and reassure the customer base, and especially those customers who are invested in the company and who are paying the bills for just about everything, which is the Norrath fan base. Smed himself seems to spend all his time and energy on everything besides Norrath. I think he may have said more about EVE Online in the last few years than he has about straight up, old school, made the whole company possible, EverQuest.

H1Z1 isn’t making any money yet, Dragon’s Prophet seems dubious as a cash cow, PlanetSide 2 is finally carrying its own weight, and DC Universe Online appears to be doing well on the PlayStation, but I wonder how much of that money flows back to SOE and how much stays behind to bolster PlayStation Plus revenues.

So, from the outside, it feels like Norrath is still paying the bills. Michael Zenke came back from talking with Smed some years back with the impression that EverQuest was so cheap to operate on a day-to-day basis that it might literally hold out until the last subscriber walks away. Throwing away the cash cow, or letting it starve, seems like a bad play. And when the layoffs seemed to be focused primarily around people working on Norrath related projects, some of the vocal members of the fan base were clearly running scared and talking about swearing off any form of EverQuest before the place ended up a stagnant backwater. So something had to be done.

That something was live streams.

I will say right now that I hate live streams for developer updates. They are fine for a special announcement or some such… SOE Live or BlizzCon level events are okay… but as a method for delivering more mundane updates or plans, I really don’t like them. They involve too much personality and not enough detail and you end up with half-considered statements that people will glom onto, like Tom Chilton saying that he felt Warlords of Draenor was further along back at BlizzCon in 2013 than Mists of Pandaria was when it was announced at BlizzCon. That practically became “Draenor by February!” in some corners. Plus, I must admit, I am old and grumpy and actively resent a developer group making me sit and watch something for an half an hour to glean maybe five minutes worth of actual details if I am lucky.

So I skipped what I could on that front and have depended on the MMO focused gaming media to deliver tidbits about what transpired.

Most of the coverage was about EverQuest Next, as that is the future of Norrath on which any number of former, but never again, EverQuest and EverQuest II players have pinned their hopes on.

Still looking at this picture of EverQuest Next vision…

On the interesting side of things, there is apparently some hedging as to whether or not EverQuest Next will be free to play, or at least free to play in the current SOE model. I suspect that might be wishful thinking, because unless Daybreak really has something new and different that can command a box price or a mandatory subscription, they might do themselves more harm than good going that route. And my confidence in Daybreak being able to recognize a good idea from a bad one, given their track record, is pretty low. But I couldn’t tell you if, in the long term, F2P has been the salvation that has been claimed on the Norrath front.

Then there is EverQuest Next on consoles. Given what Smed has been preaching since the acquisition has been announced, that feels more likely an outcome than not. The question then becomes one of balance… as in how many PC players will stop playing the game when they find a clunky UI designed to be used with a gamepad? There is going to have to be a lot of XBox and PlayStation interest to counteract shitting all over the main fanbase if we end up with a DCUO interface.

I refuse to go full Tobold here and declare that this move means that EverQuest Next is likely to be a boring old WoW clone. On the break with Storybricks, Senior Producer Terry Michaels said,

We made the decision that it was in the best interest of the game to take that work in-house. They did a lot of work for us and we’ll be utilizing that. It’s not like that work is lost.

So I am not sure you can make the logic-defying leap and declare that EverQuest Next is going to be completely 2007 or whatever in makeup because of this change, at least not without a supporting argument along the lines of “SOE is lying to us again” or some evidence that they are, indeed, trashing all the code related to Storybricks’ involvement. Of course, bringing all of that work in-house isn’t likely to make EverQuest Next appear in the “near future” as was recently mentioned.

Anyway, that is the meat of what I saw over the weekend, which really wasn’t all that much, as the game is still out in the future. I am sure I missed some details on the EverQuest Next front, I’m just not sure they matter until the game is an actual thing on Steam access at a minimum.

I had to go to a more a dedicated site, the ever alert EQ2 Wire, to find out what was going on when it came to news from the EverQuest II stream. That appeared to be much more focused on simply reassuring the fan base that EverQuest II was still a going concern.

Is there still treasure in post-cataclysm Norrath?

The core of that seemed to be that updates and events and what not would continue on as before along with an acknowledgement around some pathological desire in the fan base to have a duck mount.

Then there was the EverQuest stream, which as far as I can tell, no MMO news site even bothered to dig into, so I had to actually go listen to that video once it was up on YouTube. (I put the video in the background because people sitting around talking wasn’t exactly adding to the flow of information.)

There the talk started off with some of the diminished team introducing themselves, and a statement that Holly Longdale was taking over as executive producer, putting her in charge of both EQ and EQII. There was mention of new updates coming up in the next couple of months, including a new loot system and some vague statements about this year’s expansion, so I suppose that isn’t totally out the window, along with some minor talk about what they want to add to the game going forward, including making the UI better.

The biggest part of that whole stream for me was the mention of continuing to do things that work well with EverQuest, including progression servers. There wasn’t anything concrete about how they want to do them going forward or what form they would take, but they were definitely on record that they want to do them again, which is great. I thought we had kissed that idea good-bye forever once free to play hit everywhere.

So many expansions to unlock

For a game that has such nostalgia value for so many people, the whole progression server idea has always been a winner, delivering a lot of bang for the buck for bother players and the company. There are a lot of players who will jump on board, even if it is subscription only, to have a “Day one, everybody level 1, lets go camp bandits!” experience. It would just be nice if Daybreak could actually really run with the idea and promote it and keep people interested. My past experience has been that progression servers get attention for about five minutes on the front page and then never get mentioned again, while in the forums, the most common company presence is SOE-MOD-04, the harbinger of locked threads. The Fippy Darkpaw progression server just passed the four year mark last week and I still can only find updates about it when Daybreak screws something up.

Anyway, those are my notes from the weekend on the Norrathian front at Daybreak. (I will also say that the new company name is just the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to post titles.)

A few other blogs are writing a bit about these topics as well, including:

Today we learned that Linda “Brasse” Carlson has been let go as head of the community management team for the company formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment.

Brasse with beer and axe

According to the post over at EQ2 Wire, she has been part of the community team at SOE for six years at this point, though it hardly seems like that much time could have passed. It seems like only recently that her map of the Old Forest in Lord of the Rings Online, posted up on her site, was saving my ass from being completely lost. But that must have been years ago at this point, as the game has had a built in map for that zone for a while now.

Anyway, her maps made their way into a number of official guides for Dark Age of Camelot, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, and of course, EverQuest and EverQuest II, in addition to all those LOTRO maps that have helped me over the years. (I used her hedge maze map last time I was playing in Middle-earth. Still worth its weight in pixels.)

So she has had an impact on the community, both before as well as during her tenure.

A community team, by its very nature, can become the public face of a company. So a departure of a prominent member of the community team can alter the relationship people have with a company. I remember no small amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth (and a bit of cheering) when Greg Street, Ghostcrawler, announced he was leaving Blizzard. That changed the community dynamic. The same could be said for the departure of Rick “Sapience” Heaton from the LOTRO team. Whether the change was good or bad is subjective, but things changed.

Things were different when Alan “Brenlo” Crosby was running the community team for SOE, things will be different when the next person steps up to run it under the Daybreak banner. How different and how it will affect people… well, we shall see.

The real surprise here is how soon this move came. I know there had been some doom and gloom regarding the whole acquisition, from myself included. Bad news was expected by many. But Daybreak Gaming Company doesn’t even have a new logo yet (though they were quick to pull down the old one), but already they are letting people go from jobs that I think are unlikely to be considered redundant. Then again, they don’t need anybody running the SOE Live event this year, since that has been cancelled. Maybe Smed, who has been out in the front lines engaging with the community… at least on Reddit, the new official SOE community home… will be the sole face of the company for now. We will see how secure his job is.

“Sony Online Entertainment, newly rebranded as Daybreak, is a great addition to our existing portfolio of technology, media and entertainment focused companies. We see tremendous opportunities for growth with the expansion of the company’s game portfolio through multi-platform offerings as well as an exciting portfolio of new quality games coming up, including the recently launched H1Z1 and the highly anticipated EverQuest Next to be released in the near future,”

Has Jason Epstein already been briefed on the usage of the word “soon” at old SOE? Is this an attempt to avoid that word and its baggage or the beginning of a new empty phrase for the house that EverQuest built?

“Soon” Defined

I ask because I cannot see EverQuest Next being released during any period of time I would judge to be the “near future,” unless we start measuring against scales of time beyond the span of my life. The foundation for EverQuest Next is in Landmark, and that has yet to be released or have a release date or even a date when they might be able to announce a release date. So consider my eyebrow arched significantly at the idea of the “near future” in conjunction with EverQuest Next. (Also, Jason, a new name for that please?)

Of course, Mr. Epstein might not know any better at this point. There has been a whole acquisition dance going on for a while now. These things do not happen over night, they are months in the making. And I am sure a bunch of people at the company formerly known as SOE are realizing that this was why Smed was gone at some point or why a bunch of strangers were camped in one of the conference rooms for a week or why that “interview candidate” who looked like a lawyer was being given a detailed tour of the build system. (That last one actually happened to me at one company.)

And while nobody is suppose to overtly lie about material facts during that dance, like any mating ritual, things do tend to be presented in the optimum setting. The lights are dimmed, blemishes are glossed over, makeup is applied, guts are sucked in, promises are whispered in a moment of passion, all to make each partner more alluring.

Now though, we are at the morning after. The harsh light of Daybreak is shining through the window, lipstick is smeared, promises are forgotten, and somebody clearly can only describe their belt buckle from memory once it is wrapped about what could be their waist, but only because that is where their pants end.

All pretense is at an end and all the bullshit is revealed. It is time to get to work and actually deal with reality. It might be only at this point that the actual idea of “near future” is being revealed and that all those nifty demos of the game do not make a whole.

Then again, there might be a simple answer to this nested in the very same sentence. Mr. Epstein refers to H1Z1 as “recently launched.” Perhaps his view of the world aligns with some of us on the outside of the company, that once you start taking money in exchange for your game it is effectively launched and all of this “early access” and “beta” talk is just posturing bullshit.

Anyway, we shall see just how “near” the “near future” really is and what being released really means to this newly “independent” Daybreak.

Also, can we just go with “DGC” when referring to Daybreak Game Company? Writing “Daybreak” just feels odd still.

When I first saw this news, my reaction was that today is Groundhog Day and not April Fool’s Day. Even with Smed’s current love affair with Reddit, that seemed like a questionable source. But there was the announcement over on the official SOE forums as well.

Dear Players, Partners and Friends,

Today, we are pleased to announce that we have been acquired by Columbus Nova, an investment management firm well known for its success with its existing portfolio of technology, media and entertainment focused companies. This means that effective immediately SOE will operate as an independent game development studio where we will continue to focus on creating exceptional online games for players around the world, and now as a multi-platform gaming company. Yes, that means PlayStation and Xbox, mobile and more!

As part of this transition, SOE will now become Daybreak Game Company. This name embodies who we are as an organization, and is a nod to the passion and dedication of our employees and players. It is also representative of our vision to approach each new day as an opportunity to move gaming forward.

So what exactly does this mean for you? It will be business as usual and all SOE games will continue on their current path of development and operation. In fact, we expect to have even more resources available to us as a result of this acquisition. It also means new exciting developments for our existing IP and games as we can now fully embrace the multi-platform world we are living in.

Our games and players are the heart and soul of our organization, and we are committed to maintaining our portfolio of online games and pushing the limits of where we can take online gaming together.

Thank you for your continued support. See you in game!

The Team at Daybreak

So there it is. Sony has sold off Sony Online Entertainment to Columbus Nova, an investment group with a vague web site (which is being pounded to hell right now) and, as far as I can tell, no history in video games. (The whole thing is tagged as copyright 2006 FFS.)

Nobody can tell you what the future will hold yet. There is going to be a long period of just untangling SOE, now known as Daybreak, from their former corporate masters at Sony and Sony Computer Entertainment America before we will really be able to tell where things are heading.

Contrary to the happy tone of that announcement… which, honestly, is the tone they HAVE to take… my own experience with Silicon Valley acquisitions puts this in a dim light. My gut says that if this follows the common acquisition model, it will eventually mean layoffs and trimming back the product line (PlanetSide will be gone first), while other legacy products will be milked for cash (i.e. expansions and updates will trail off) until they are shuttered (EverQuest, EverQuest II). The company will chase some specific version of the “future” (consoles?), leaving the past behind. Expect Smed to get his golden parachute exit somewhere around the 18 month mark after finishing his transition work.

Okay, that is pretty dark. But lets just say that such acquisitions trend unhappy in my world. Investment firms tend to pillage rather than invest, no matter what their prospectus says. There is that SOE history to contend with as well. So many things they have done have SEEMED like good ideas at the time. (ProSiebenSat.1 anyone?) But SOE probably didn’t have a choice in the matter, so maybe it won’t be SOE being SOE.

Also, what does the name Daybreak signify? Is this a zombie thing? All I know is that there used to be a bar called The Daybreak near my old apartment. That is going to make for an odd mental image. Also, picture everything that says “Sony” now saying “Daybreak.”